alt Hacker NewsStackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
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OK, let's get this out of the way:
1. SO question numbers dropped precipitously before AI came along.
2. AI clearly finished the job.
I took the graph from this very page and annotated it with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.[0] Yes, the decline hastened after that, inarguably. But also, it was already nearly 50% down from its June 2020 local maxima. This is also inarguable.
SO had been flatlined since 2014 and declining since 2017. It dropped off a cliff when, 2.5 years after its 2020 bounce, ChatGPT came along with the death blow. Even then, it looks like 4 months of ChatGPT speed-ran about a year's worth of traffic decline, and then the slope went back to approximately the pre-AI angle.
I contend, and I'm backed by facts, that AI is not what started the avalanche. It killed any slim chance of a comeback, but that wasn't the beginning of the end. The end was already well begun by then.
I stopped posting questions onto Stack Overflow after experiencing two user-hostile practices of theirs.
The first was how they would repeatedly mark my posts as dupes when in reality they weren't. Sure, my questions had large overlaps with existing questions. But mine had sufficient nuanced differences that my questions warranted being open.
The second is how they would repeatedly rewrite my posts. And extensively so! It no longer sounded like it was written by me. And any sense of warmth or humanity of my posts were entirely stripped away! So sterile and cold. I have to tell you, having a post that you spend time composing, only to have some moderators a-hole rewrite it is a very negative feeling. And to see a message posted publicly to the web with my username next to it, as though I'm the one that wrote it, is wrong.
Stack Overflow brought their death to themselves.
You're underselling it. It's less than in their second month of existence - and that has been true every month for the past year. For the last few months it's also lower than their first month. Stack Overflow, effectively, no longer exists.
And we know why. It's because of their hostile attitude towards their users.
No doubt they'll continue operating until there's no more value in selling AI data licenses, then they'll unplug the servers and unregister the business.
SO in the end was like walking into a bar, and the music stops, and all the regulars stare at you, and say “Yeah, what do YOU want, kid? Quit wasting our time. And by the way, you opened the door wrong.”
Most of the easy questions have been asked. I stopped using it because I was asking questions that weren’t trivial to answer, and I guess it is easier to earn internet points through mod actions than through writing answers.
I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.
I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.
When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)
Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.
Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.
Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.
I just dont go there at all because they added the weird copied of stackoverflow feature when copying code from there. Like even if I want to use its actively hostile, I need to paste it somewhere remove all of the extra things added and then copy properly
Reddit is going the same way.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
I used to land on SO questions and answers through Google. Nowadays I ask ChatGPT or Claude instead of Google, and then go to the links they give me to verify. The links are either to the official docs or some blog posts. Never have I seen LLMs recommend any SO links.
It's ironic/unfortunate they took the moderationazy path right when the site needed to find its new direction.
Some months ago I posted a question there after a long time, something that the LLMs could not give me a satisfactory response. It got deleted for being unsuitable for the site.
I'm not particularly a new user of SO. been using for 15 years and 5.5k reputation, which does not say much more that I know how to ask questions there, or I used to know.
Desperate, I take the question to a meeting with the language team. The guy gets excited: "this kind of question is why we keep holding these sessions"
SO became what it was by setting rules that worked extremely well. They even occasionally let some QnAs slip by, like the famous Jon Skeet Chuck Norris facts[1]. Now those same rules don't work well for a vibrant community, and at the same time they are being followed pedantically.
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...
My biggest turnoff was dealing with the gatekeepers who will treat you like you were asking stupid questions to a topic you obviously didn't know. I am glad AI is here and killed that; there is not stupid questions for AI. The walls for learning have been breached.
StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.
After posting a few questions to SO I often ended up not getting a response or solving the problem myself after further research which in reality sums up the site is a whole.
1) If you already have enough programming experience to understand algorithms and abstract concepts in programming you can find the answer by doing research.
2) More often than not the answers were citing answers that already exist elsewhere.
3) A lot of the trivial answers were marked as low quality, dupes and so on when these were the people who could benefit from SO the most.
Eventually I stopped visiting the site around 2 years after getting into programming since it rarely provided anything of value.
--
Serverfault was great and I will miss it.
From May, but I wrote about how similar social/community sites have been following this upside down bell pattern for decades. In this case it might be caused by AI, but you can't conclude anything about AI just by looking at the graph
https://techstackups.com/articles/stackoverflow-graphs-prove...
I wonder how many people actually had bad experiences with SO vs how many people found it genuinely helpful. I'm going to guess the people with bad experiences are much more likely to comment about it loudly than all the people who found it helpful. (I always feel this dissonance when reading about the mean mods ruining the site, since I never experienced them firsthand.)
What in the world is the explanation for this google trends line[1]? I’d have assumed it would have been a rapid decline since ai but there was a wild spike earlier this year before a massive crash - any ideas?
[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Stack%20overflow&date=to...
Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
i know SO gets a lot of hate but it massively helped with my work. Majority of questions I had were already answered. Ive only posted 2 questions, and neither was taken down. My questions were specific and more to the point.
With LLMs around, I no longer use it as much. And its a shame because I am worried in general that we might be losing communities like these
Related discussion What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph (483 points, 3 months ago, 595 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956949
I was wondering where all those egoistic developers with superiority complexes go these days to feed their egos. I was scared every time asking even a single question on SO. The place was toxic as hell.
I don't think this should be celebrated, even though they had a bad attitude.
We are losing communities and human communication to LLM chats.
StackOverflow's poor gameification of the platform is the singular reason it suffered from its awful culture.
If you had enough reputation, you'd be invited to these review queues, like the Close Vote queue.
You got a point toward a new badge if you voted to Close. You get nothing if you chose to keep it open. There was always a perverse incentive there to act, to make a question "better," to nitpick a perfectly fine answer.
I do not at all like how they changed most posting dates to just say "over a year ago". When looking up solutions to code issues, the date of the answer often matters a great deal.
It's odd it still exists at all still. What would compel someone to even post a question on SO anymore.
Basically the equivalent of shouting out some highly specific technical query down a dark alleyway and hoping against all odds for a better response than models trained on all of stack overflow already.
They should reboot, focused on
1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and
2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)
This does four things simultaneously:
1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model
2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)
3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.
4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems
SO has been useless for years now, but the other Stack Exchanges can be interesting, they deserve more spotlight.
People blame AI and/or the culture there, but IMO competition got it. As more and more code went to public domains (i.e., mostly GitHub), it became just as quick and often better to go to the source itself.
I still dream of driving to the moderators houses and hurting them. Not really of course but it was one nasty place in the end with all little tech gestapos on their sad little thrones. Happy it’s gone.
Is there a word that explicitly captures the fear and stress induced by hitting "save" on a stack overflow question you've spent 30 minutes formatting and triple checking to ensure that it won't get thrown out by mods?
Stack overflow started as maximize signal to noise for professionals.
It transitioned to emphasize "less toxic" and in the process minimized signal.
The result has no purpose.
while the SO is dying a painful death (not going to sugar coat it), my questions whether the knowledge in there is already assimilated into the AI's knowledge database? If it is, it can be retrievable in the future.
A lot of the answers are factually useful and it would a massive loss if it ever just disappear into the ether.
And how much was AI trained on their data? That's the sad part. Nobody asking new questions, so not much more for AI to train from.
I'm just feeling bad just because stackoverflow was my coding bible (back when AI did not exist)
Getting second hand sadness
It was a very flawed site. If you ever tried to ask a question they'd tell you to fuck off, but 99% of their threads were just empty with toxic comments from the mods. You'd find the perfect thread for your problem, and then it would just be locked as a dupe with no actual answer thread available.
I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.
as a student i remmeber ikept getting my questions removed even after trying to follow every rule. this one time i decided i will use their top questions as a template just to test it, so i did i made sure it was a new question, following each rule
It was also deleted, die already stack overflow
It's funny how my experience with SO is nowhere near as bad as what HN usually reports.
I admit that my first few questions earned me a lot of downvotes due to their poor quality. But it humbled me and taught me the importance to create minimal reproducible examples.
After that, some of my questions were answered in depth by experts. I was blown away and very grateful that some random stranger would take the time to answer such a niche question I had.
Besides, I've seen colleagues of mine whom I consider brilliant but whose questions on public forums were bad... They give too many details, leave out part of the context, don't make it easy to reproduce their error, ask vague questions, and so on. I wonder if it's for the same reasons that HN has trouble with SO.
This might be the saddest, non-family related thing ive seen in years.
I love you stack exchange and all related sites.
All yall need to keep learning
SO was invented as a Q&A site, where human experts might answer specific technical questions, in a precise, preferably provable way. This is what machines now do well enough.
But there's a need to talk to human experts, learn their opinions, personal experience, non-obvious bits. E.g. I enjoyed asking certain questions at Software Engineering and Emacs SE sites. Sometimes I just ended up talking with a maintainer of a specific package I had questions about. This is something Claude and ChatGPT cannot easily replace, and maybe something that may keep certain SO communities alive. (Unless Reddit eats the remnants of their lunch.)
If there is any proof that no one will be writing code, this is it.
I encourage all young developers to focus on information architecture, application architecture, pure logic, domain-driven design, and harness engineering.
The two takeaways from me are that:
1. AI allows you to ask stupid questions or the same question without (typically) ridiculing or demeaning you for doing so.
2. Context changes as time rolls by. A question that was asked some period ago might just need to be re-asked, continuously and ongoing.
Now, SO had already suffered its demise prior to AI. But good riddance, from my point of view. StackOverflow was great in its day, essential even. But it fell victim to its own success, I guess.
Fewer than 1,000? To be honest, even before AI, I'm surprised it ever got more than 50 or a 100 in some StackExchanges. It was on borrowed time especially after reading a lot about the moderator drama/issues.
StackOverflow jobs was great when it existed, found great opportunities through there. So dumb they killed it especially with LLM's eating their core business.
I've browsed SO and friends a lot over the years, and still do, but not sure I ever posted a question there. I read answers, and posted a few answers. I think I'd go to IRC or a forum or issue tracker to ask for help instead. Maybe some generational or cultural thing going on.
Every interesting problem I ever had that I checked SO for was either off topic and modded down or the original poster said “I found a solution” and disappeared. Pure misery!
Wow, what a steep drop off. They've gotten fewer questions over the last year than they averaged per month in 2024.
I remember the day I ask my first question about C, instead of an answer I got -1.
Questions and answers are locked inside discord, slacks and LLM chats
And like 950 of them were probably closed for being "off-topic".
What is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?
Oh yes. Now I remember. I used to visit the site every day.
I love helping my fellow developers and answering their questions whenever I can.
My reputation there is 29,020, and I've contributed 645 quality answers.
I used to brag about this.
Now I had to think a bit to remember SO still exists.
My last answer was on May 28, 2021, over five years ago.
Obviously it wasn't LLMs that drove me away. And I'm not sure what it was.
Was it the culture, as others here pointed out? Or did I just get busy with other things?